Over at Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta published a post concerning a couple of ominous notes received by an atheist leader at an “atheist church.” Public Catholic reader Lark brought this to my attention and asked me to comment on it.

I have zero problems saying that the nutso practice of putting threatening letters in people’s mailboxes is not only a federal crime, it is wrong.

There’s a lot I don’t know about this note-in-the-mailbox scenario. According to Mr Mehta’s post, the recipients of these missives are leaders in a local Louisiana “atheist church.” Leaving aside the whole question of “atheist church,” which, to be honest, sounds more like a community gathering than a church, let’s take up the two notes.

So far as I can tell from Mr Mehta’s post, these notes were placed anonymously in the family’s mailbox. The photos of the notes show them to be typewritten. I can see how someone who hasn’t experienced this before might find them threatening. Evidently, the family in question is taking them very seriously indeed. Most of the family has been moved “somewhere safe.”

Speaking as someone who has been a public figure for a long, long time, I can tell you that morons say a lot of moronic things, and that a good number of those moronic things are threatening.

Looking at the photos of these notes, I can make all sorts of conjectures about where they came from, ranging from teens playing a joke to a seriously disturbed nut, to — and this is reaching, but it could be true — a small group of militia types. That’s how vague my understanding of this is.

Frankly, I think our society gives people far too much leeway for inflicting their inner crazy on the people around them. I have a file on my hard drive, called the Crazy People file, where I put the threats and insults I got from the public (never from the district I represented) during my tenure as a legislator.

I’ve had people follow me around the state, showing up at every speaking engagement to heckle me. I’ve had my house broken into and my political records riffled through. Some idiot even stole my garbage right out of the can. I’ve had my tires slashed — repeatedly — and my brake lines cut. They even killed my dog.

My delete file here at Patheos gets steady incoming from the moron side of every issue we discuss. Most of these are just snipes and barbs and nutty diatribes. I get batches of the same insult that come in waves, which are obviously the result of a post by another blogger out there somewhere, flogging me for my opinions. After public office, this is pretty tame stuff. Blogging doesn’t seem to raise the same level of hate as political office.

I mention all this because I think we need a bit of perspective in the matter of these two notes. I don’t know if the notes were the only thing that happened, or if there have been other things, as well. Assuming that the notes are the whole deal, I repeat: They were wrong. Placing them in a mailbox is a federal crime.

If someone who claims to be following Christ put them there, they’ve got their heads on backwards. Hatred and attacking other people is sinful. It can keep you from going to heaven.

I think the solution to this situation is for both sides to try a dose of live and let live. Atheists have every right to think as they think and believe (or disbelieve) as they believe. However, that does not include the practice of continuously attacking, insulting and badgering other people. It’s wrong for everybody, including atheists, to behave this way.

Hopefully, these notes were a prank of some sort. If they were not, I hope that the perpetrators are found and punished.

Public life has good things about it, not the least of which being the many wonderful people you meet.

But the morons are out there.

And they say and do moronic things.

My advice to everyone, whether they are atheist or people of faith or just done care, is to stop inflicting your inner crazy on other people.

I don’t think I’m going to drink the water the next time I go to the Capitol building in Washington.

I also might need to make myself a nice little aluminum foil hat.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any crazier, a member of the United States House of Representatives staff, identified in press reports as a stenographer, jumped to the podium during the debt limit vote and began shouting.

She had to be removed from the room. Reporters heard her shouting something about “He can not be mocked,” and the nation having been founded by freemasons.

Someone turned on a recorder during this last part. If you want to hear it, you can find it on CNN. The Daily Beast identified her as Dianne Ready, but it sounds like the people who were trying to calm her down were calling her Molly.

Jokes aside, I’m guessing that the tension and hatred in the Capitol building right now are so thick you could build a bridge with them. I can sympathize. I’ve never been in a legislative situation as messed up as this one, but I’ve done enough to know that these people need to get away from one another for a while. Nothing good is going to come from any of them until they get past this and settle down.

And, oh yes, craziness aside, they did manage to pull this country back from the brink of default … for a while. This deal expires after the first of the year.

A stenographer climbed the dais of the House of Representatives and started shouting in the last minutes of a House vote to end the government shutdown.

The House stenographer, who has been identified by other outlets as Dianne Reidy, “had kind of a crazed look” in her eyes according to Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) when she ascended the dais—just below Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) who was presiding over the House at the time—as the minutes ticked down in the crucial vote. The microphones in the chamber were off so that what she was saying was unintelligible on the floor and to viewers on C-SPAN.

After Reidy was escorted out of the House chamber by several staffers from the House Sergeant at Arms office, she shouted “He will not be mocked” referring, presumably to God. She went on to proclaim that the United States “was not one nation under God, had it been, the Constitution would not have been written by Freemasons. They go against God. You cannot serve two masters. Praise be to God. Lord Jesus Christ.” Her outburst visibly disturbed a number of members and staffers, including House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), both of whom ran out of the chamber after her. Reidy was eventually hustled into an elevator by staffers.

Once the vote concluded, both reporters and congressmen seemed more eager to talk about this incident than the final tally.

Representative Rebecca Hamilton, 18-year member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives talks about life as a Public Catholic. Read her Bio Here

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